The present invention relates to a digital broadcast receiving apparatus for displaying an electronic program guide on a monitor, and particularly to a digital broadcast receiving apparatus for making a recording reservation for a program using the electronic program guide.
In recent years, in digital satellite broadcasting using a broadcasting satellite or a communication satellite, broadcast on multiple channels is implemented by performing encoding through a compression method such as MPEG2 (Moving Picture Experts Group 2) which is international standards and sending. Because of this, for example, the number of channels becomes as large as 200 to 300 and an operation for selecting a desired program from among these also becomes complicated.
Thus, electronic program guide (EPG) data for providing notification of a schedule of a broadcast program or the contents of a program is transmitted together with a television broadcast signal. An electronic program guide is displayed on a monitor based on this electronic program guide data and using the displayed electronic program guide, a user makes a selection of a desired program or a recording reservation.
Such an electronic program guide is constructed in a matrix manner, for example, in which the axis of ordinate is a channel axis and the axis of abscissa is a time axis, and a program frame corresponding to broadcast time of each program is displayed, and a program name is displayed within each the program frame. For example, in the case of making a recording reservation, when a cursor positioned in a program unit on the electronic program guide displayed on the monitor is moved and the cursor is positioned in a desired program and, for example, a decision key is pushed down, it is constructed so as to complete a recording reservation for this program.
However, in the conventional electronic program guide described above, in the case of making a recording reservation, it is constructed so as to position a cursor in a desired program and make a recording reservation for this program, so that the recording reservation could be made in a program unit, but a recording reservation by making time setting freely could not be made, for example, a recording reservation in which the last five minutes of a program is advanced could not be made.
By the way, in the conventional electronic program guide, a program displayed by one program frame as one program even though being constructed of plural programs is present. That is, for example, as shown in FIG. 6, there is a case that a program displayed by one program frame of “nostalgic movies” is constructed of three movies such as “Godzilla”, “Star Wars” and “Matrix”. In such a case, a cursor is positioned in the program frame of “nostalgic movies” and in the case of making a recording reservation, a recording reservation for the entire program of “nostalgic movies” could be made, but a recording reservation could not be made in an individual movie unit. This causes the following disadvantages. In other words, even when a movie which wants to be recorded among the three movies is one, there is a disadvantage that the other two movies must be recorded together, and further there is the following disadvantage on making recording of three movies (or the number of movies of three or more movies). As recording equipment, it is considered that a hard disk recorder capable of long-time recording of about ten hours becomes widespread in the future, but under present circumstances, a VCR of a VHS type is general, so that when three movies are recorded, there is a disadvantage that triple recording by a 120-minute tape must necessarily be selected and image quality becomes worse. In case that one movie can be extracted to make recording, high-quality recording can be made even for a general VCR.
Further, a program guide display apparatus in which in the case that there are plural short-time programs with short broadcast time, when a cursor shows a marker, only a part of short-time program guides is displayed and display of the short-time program guides is switched according to an operation of a display switching key and plural short-time program guides are displayed using small space is disclosed in, for example, the Unexamined Japanese Patent Application No. Hei10-262192.
However, in this case, it is a method for displaying the plural short-time program guides difficult to display in limited space, and the plural short-time program guides are respectively constructed as one program, so that the above-described object in a program displayed by one program frame as one program even though being constructed of the plural programs as described above cannot be solved.